“Galaxies, galaxies everywhere – as far as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope can see. This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this galaxy-studded view represents a ‘deep’ core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years.

“The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies – the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals – thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.

“In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others like links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge.”

Video: Flickr CC-licensed pics set to hilarious music and lyrics – Cory Doctorow:
Jonathan Coulton made this amazing video in tribute the Flickr: it’s a stream of funny, oddly mismatched Creative Commons-licensed photos with soulful lyrics that describe them in earnest, deadpan irony. For anyone whose ever browser the Flickr Interesting Photos stream, this is weirdly familiar: the hilarious juxtaposition of all these disparate images from all over the world. Setting them to music makes them all make sense, somehow:

10. Numa Numa Dance – “What do you get when you combine a Romanian chart-topper, an American teenager, and a webcam? The Numa Numa Dance. New Jersey 19-year-old Gary Brolsma found Internet fame when he not only lip-synched, but did a slick choreographed routineâ€”albeit without leaving his chairâ€”to “Dragostea Din Tei,” a dance track by Romanian pop trio O-Zone… Though Brolsma ultimately shunned his fame, his performance is among the most-linked, forwarded, and immitated videos of the the year, even earning him a profile in the New York Times.”

8. “Wizards in Winter” synchronized Christmas lights – When Mason, Ohio’s Carson Williams set up a video camera to record his music-synchronized Christmas light display, I’m sure he knew it was cool… The video, which shows Williams’ 25,000-light display dancing in perfect sync with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s bombastic ‘Wizards in Winter,’ seems so perfect that some people believed it was a series of stop-motion capture rather than real-time. In fact, the setup took the electrical engineer nearly two months and $10,000 to accomplish…. Miller Brewing filmed his spectacle for a Miller Lite commercial (‘Enjoy the Lites’), and the police eventually asked him to shut it down,,.